Wordpress

This was somewhat of an agonizing decision. The Joomla vs WordPress debate. With all the work that is involved either way, making the right choice was important. While I am sure it will be more work initially, I chose Joomla mostly because I am convinced it can do the job and I need to learn more about how it works. I am confident that I could have used WordPress and the results would have been great but I already have a pretty good handle on that tool having done numerous sites with it. WordPress and Joomla approach site building differently and while I had a good picture in my mind of what I could accomplish with WordPress I really have no idea how I will structure the Joomla site and what the end result will look like.

I am going to redo the slopeflyer.com site and have been thinking about replacing the Article Manager CMS that is powering the site now. While Article Manager has met my needs for the past several years it simply doesn’t have some of the functionality I want to include in the redesign.

I had almost decided to do it in WordPress when I reinvestigated Joomla. I even had a nice Premium Theme I purchased that looked like it would do the job. However, I really like some of the extensibility in Joomla and now I am not so sure.

Currently slopeflyer.com has about 650 pages and about 2,000 photos that I will have to migrate so I want to make sure I get it right the first time.

I have done a bunch of WordPress sites and pretty much know what it is about but my experience with Joomla is limited with most of the investigations I did of it a year or more ago.

If anyone has comments on pros and cons of using one over the other, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I am working with American Micrographics, a digital imaging and record retention service here in Milwaukee. We are doing a website to showcase the capabilities of the company. It is a cool place because not only can they do all the current digital imaging techniques but they have bunch of legacy machines like aperture card readers and several types of microfilm machines that represent several decades of record retention and archiving services. Converting these legacy storage systems to the digital age is an interesting process.

The website is, of course, WordPress driven and will ultimately include a custom skin and several plug-ins to add required functionality. At this point I am adding content and working on how the info flows. Skinning will be the final phase.

I recently built a WordPress powered site for friends in Fort Collins, Colorado. Their business, Garden Thyme, is one of the premier landscape gardening companies in Northern Colorado. The need for a site that the two principle people in the company could update regularly led us to a WordPress powered site. The new version 2.1 has some nice features that take the traditional blog style site and empower it to deliver a more business oriented need while still maintaining ease of use.

I also installed Gallery 2 and integrated it into the WordPress template. Showing the quality of work is important to the folks at Garden Thyme and Gallery2 is another great program that is easy to use and, in this case, great because of the ease with which it can be integrated into the WordPress site.

I did a fresh install of WordPress 2.1 for http://www.mmsworks.com today. All went well and I like the new ability to select a “Page” to be the “Home” page. You then assign a different page to be the “Posts” page. Nice for this type of site.

I use Ecto to update my blogs and wanted it to manage posts on the new MMS Works site but initially it didn’t grab the categories and posts from WordPress. It just hung up. Well, thanks to this post I now have Ecto working with the 2.1 install.